Beyond The Commons

 Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

A cry for help

by Aaron Wherry and macleans.ca on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 9:05am - 12 Comments

Mackenzie Grisdale’s full report on heckling includes a few explanations and observations from MPs, including this from the NDP’s Bruce Hyer.

He said, “a lot of backbenchers feel useless and this is one of the areas in which they can vent their frustrations and pretend to be useful.” We have also seen that when MPs are unable to get relevant answers from Ministers, they often respond by heckling. Further, the relatively low amount of attention paid to government backbenchers by Cabinet may also contribute to some MPs’ desire to heckle as a means to attract attention, if not from the executive, at least from the media.

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  • Anonymous

    As I recall the CPC program promised to hold free votes for all legislation except for monetary matters. These past few years they said it couldn’t always be done because the government held a minority of seats in the HoC but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be that way now. 

    • Phil King

      You kidder you! LOL

  • TonyAdams

    “… a lot of backbenchers feel useless …. ”

    A lot of backbenchers feel useless because they are useless. 

    If MPs don’t want to feel useless, they should make themselves useful. MPs sound a lot like passive aggressive children because MPs have been expected to behave like lemmings for decades, at least, and if they don’t like it they should change their behaviour.

    PJ O’Rourke ~ At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. 

    • Anonymous

      English philosopher, John Stuart Mill: “Not all conservatives are stupid people, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

      “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” JK Galbraith

      • TonyAdams

        I agree 100% with Mill because when he wrote that over a century ago he was talking about what we refer to as socialists, progressives now. 

        The State, which is supposedly liberal or progressive, now allows Muslims to separate males and females. The State or bureaucracy is very conservative in Canada, it always wants to control people. Mill was writing about people who think it is clever to divide teenage females on whether they are menstruating.

        Toronto’s public schools have been accommodating Muslim students’ requests for time and space to pray, during the school day, on school property. At one school, on Fridays at one p.m., 300 Grade 7 and 8 students join an imam for prayer for 30 to 40 minutes. Muslim girls who wish to be part of the prayer sit at the back of the room.

        http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/public-schools-cannot-be-places-of-prayer/article2091850/

        liberal - favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs

        conservative - tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions  or marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners

      • TonyAdams

        Was any American economist of comparable esteem so wrong—so comfortably and contentedly wrong, and for so many years—as Galbraith himself? Verily, I cannot think of a rival.

        Galbraith, let me say, was a brilliant public intellectual; an elegant (if tending to the orotund) writer; a remarkably accomplished and productive man; and, by all accounts (setting his legendary immodesty aside: He actually boasted about his immodesty), a good man. 

        He was not, however, what he apparently thought he was, or what the American Left believes him to have been: a font of economic truth; the intellectual heir to John Maynard Keynes, no less; a paradigm-shifting thinker to rival the opposing champion of free markets, Milton Friedman.

        http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/john-kenneth-galbraith-revisited/4935/

        • Anonymous

          Libertarians, on the other hand, are Conservatives who smoke dope.

  • Anonymous

    Perhaps the backbench MPs could do their jobs by looking at the government spending estimates to determine and to question some of the expenditures. In that would they would not feel so useless. Are these people suppose to be grown up and serious people. They are sent to Ottawa to do the peoples’ business. I do not see heckling on any of their job descriptions. That goes for all parties.

    • Anonymous

      In theory, we send them to Ottawa to do the peoples’ business but in practice they represent political parties in ridings.  They do a lot of fundraising, and will do more in future.

    • Anonymous

      In theory, we send them to Ottawa to do the peoples’ business but in practice they represent political parties in ridings.  They do a lot of fundraising, and will do more in future.

      • Anonymous

        Unfortunately I have to agree with you but it would serve all Canadians better if all MPs focused on their jobs rather than looking for scandal, delivering talking points and appearing on silly so called panel discussions on TV. This is why Canadians are tuning out the political class and the media. Their priorities are not our priorities. They think that Ottawa reflects the country. The Libs found out in spades that they were out of touch with most Canadians.

      • Anonymous

        Unfortunately I have to agree with you but it would serve all Canadians better if all MPs focused on their jobs rather than looking for scandal, delivering talking points and appearing on silly so called panel discussions on TV. This is why Canadians are tuning out the political class and the media. Their priorities are not our priorities. They think that Ottawa reflects the country. The Libs found out in spades that they were out of touch with most Canadians.

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